


i'd tell myself you don't mean a thing

by buries



Category: Shadowhunters (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Future, Denial of Feelings, Established Relationship, F/M, Future Fic, Past Clary Fray/Jace Wayland, Past Maia Roberts/Simon Lewis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-20
Updated: 2017-08-20
Packaged: 2018-12-17 16:51:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11855748
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/buries/pseuds/buries
Summary: i think your scar is cool.or the one where jace and maia's scars look good together. future fic.





	i'd tell myself you don't mean a thing

**Author's Note:**

> jesus take the wheel, i cannot believe i've written _shadowhunters_ fic! i binged this show and fell in love with the chemistry between jace and maia, and since i've been itching to write again, i ended up with this.
> 
> this is set in the future, definitely post-s2 in terms of canon information. written to the prompt _disgust_.
> 
> title from paloma faith's _only love can hurt like this_. unbeta'd, all mistakes are mine. thanks for reading! ♥

He sits at the bar, slinking into the shadows. She always thought someone like him, brilliantly gold and insufferably arrogant, would want to burn as bright as the sun. But he doesn’t burn her. The bar’s busy, with men and women sitting at the counter, standing by it, barking for her attention. He sits, quiet, like a lone soul, listening to the sounds, watching her when he thinks she’s not watching him.

The thing is, she’s always watching him. She’s a wolf, nose sharp on her surroundings, ears peeled for the odd shift of a foot. She can hear his tapping against the side of the bar sometimes, a useless rhythm. _Thump_ , when she’s talking to a man who smiles too brightly; _thump_ when a woman with thick eyeliner glares.

It isn’t until it’s late, when the moon’s hit the apex of the sky, settling in to watch, that the the bar dies down. The sounds dim like the lights, and the men and women trickle out, first loudly with their laughter, then softly with the patter of footsteps, arms wrapped around waists as feet stumble out the door.

He stays. _Thump_ , when she turns her back to him. _Thump_ , when the musician packs up and leaves. It’s the only music she hears now, the odd _thump_ of his shoe against the wood of the bar.

Grabbing a damp rag, she begins wiping from the far end of the counter. Not once does she look at him. It’s a game, to see who’ll look first. Despite what many may think, Jace is the one who always loses. He has a knack for looking into the distance, gaze unfocused, mouth slack, his expression unguarded. In those moments, he’s not thinking of her. She doesn’t think so. No one thinks of Maia Roberts and gets slack jawed and cloudy-eyed.

But he looks. He’s always looking. Blaming it on needing to be a Shadowhunter: observant, awake, sharply focused.

Slowly making her way up the counter, she looks at him from the corner of her eye. Just checking, she’d say, to see if you’re up for losing tonight. But it seems as though he isn’t. Jace looks determined, lips curved upward in a smug little smile. She wants to wipe it off him, with a slap of her hand, a glide of her thumb, a press of her mouth.

He studies his shot glass, amber liquid still sitting on the bottom. His finger glides around the rim of it, around and around, dropping off when it reaches the opposite side, always an incomplete circle.

Once she reaches him, she doesn’t wipe around him. Instead, she drags the cloth against his hands, makes sure it whips his wrists, and then goes over his arms, wiping them as though he’s part of the furniture. Might as well be. Luke thinks he’s a permanent fixture in the bar now, and in the Jade Wolf, when she’s not working. 

He breaks into a laugh. “You mind?” he exclaims.

She shakes her head, “Not at all.” She wipes his hands attentively, for good measure. Once she’s done, bored by it, she drops the rag to the side and looks at him. “You’re still here.”

“I’m still here,” he says, looking at her.

She nods toward his shot glass. “You done?”

Looking down, he contemplates his answer. If he says yes, then he has a reason to leave. She knows it’s the way of this Shadowhunter — come in for a quick drink, knock it down, then back to work he goes.

He shakes his head. “Nah,” he says. He doesn’t pick up the shot glass. He looks up, smile brilliantly bright and warm, “I’m just getting started.”

She nods, smiling. Feeling pleased, heat curls up her neck, sitting on her cheeks, behind her ears, on the very top of her head. She looks away.

He lets out a breath. “So …” he serves the empty bar a look. “Busy night.”

Her laugh is a loud bark. “Yeah,” she says, nodding. She shakes her head. “I love nights like these.”

He’s looking at her attentively. A crinkle to his brow, he asks, “Why?”

Lifting her shoulders, she looks around, surveying the empty chairs, the dark stage, the quiet bar. Her colleagues have left for the night, at her own quiet request. She can close up without any help. “I don’t know,” she says, finding her lips curve into a sheepish smile. She wants to laugh the tension away, laugh away the feeling she’s on the spot right now. “I like how busy it is. I like the people, the conversations. It reminds me that I’m lucky to be alive.”

From the corner of her eye, she can see he nods. “I get that,” he says. She supposes he would. At least now, more than ever. 

The world hasn’t been kind to either of them. There’s a scar on Jace, in the shape of Valentine; it sits on his heart, bears weight on his shoulders, and sometimes stops his feet from moving. It’s been years, she knows, but those kind of scars don’t fade away.

Sometimes the claw marks on her neck sting. On full moons, they do. Along the street, it burns like her skin is being licked away by flames.

She looks at him, and finds he’s looking at her. Then, he smiles, not embarrassed she’s caught him studying her. She notices his eyes drop from her face and down. Past her mouth, she realises, as she unconsciously licks her lips. It’s further down, his gaze, settling on her neck.

Her hand reaches up to cover her scars. When she notices the slightest furrow of his brows, she realises that she’s done. It’s an unconscious move, one she’d thought she’d grown out of. Maia has learned to not be embarrassed by the marks, wearing them proudly on display. She doesn’t wear turtlenecks, despite sometimes feeling like it’d be better. Safer, to walk to a table and serve them drinks, to know the sudden death of a conversation isn’t because of her. 

“Hey,” he says quietly. “They’re badass. I wish I had scars like that to show.”

Her lips curve upward, slowly. Her hand, as if no longer under her control, is reluctant to move away. It does, eventually; her hand slides down from the slope of her shoulder, before hanging uselessly by her side. 

Jace leans forward. “Come here,” he says, face suddenly serious. There’s a pinch to his brows that’s familiar, and she realises it often means he’s at work. This is the Shadowhunter face he wears, though his lips aren’t pursed, his body isn’t stiff and unreadable. Instead, he’s warm, approachable. He could be slightly drunk. Jace does stupid shit when he’s drunk.

She pushes that thought away. He’s not drunk. If Jace was drunk, his gaze wouldn’t be soft, fleeting, uncertain and shy. Around her, it’s like he’s unbalanced. She’s a wolf that’s charged at his legs, knocked him out at the knees, and he’s landed flat on his ass. Said so himself, once, with a laugh.

She does her best not to study his face, afraid of what she’d see. Instead, she merely looks at him, like he’s a cluster of stars littering the night sky she has no interest in.

Leaning her elbows against the counter, Maia leans forward. Resting her lower arms on the top of it, the wood feels wet, a little sticky, and cold. Her brows crease together as she says, “What?”

“Can I?” For a moment she doesn’t get what he’s asking, but when she looks to the side, she sees his hand raised, waiting for an invitation.

Her heart skips a beat. Swallowing thickly, she tries to think. In this moment, it’s impossible to. She has no answer for him, no direction; she is a wolf who has been abandoned by her senses, no longer able to carry herself home with the snout of her nose pressed to the ground, unable to hear his heart thumping heavily in his chest.

She finds herself nodding.

His hand is big, fingers long. The first thought she has is that he’s warm. She tilts her head to the side, arching her neck, and she feels his palm lift. Cool air skates against her skin, causing the hairs on her arms to stand on edge. His fingertips kiss the puckered flesh of her scars, lightly at first, like he’s afraid. Then, his touch is firmer, more confident, like he suddenly knows what he’s doing.

She doubts it.

She watches his face, noticing how his eyes are focused. His lips part, perhaps unconsciously, and his other hand is lifted slightly off the table, like he’s ready to reach forward and wrap his other hand delicately around her neck.

It goes on for too long, she thinks. This tenderness, this break in who they are. They’re sharp bits coming together, like teeth. Sometimes his touch is soft, but it’s often when she’s caught in the crossfire of work, when her ass needs saving, when she’s saved his.

Overthinking, Maia does her best not to flinch, but she draws up her shoulder like a bridge and traps his hand at the curve of where neck and shoulder meet.

That seems to break this, whatever this is. The lull, the tension. It’s thick, heavy, the bar, despite how big it is, becomes suddenly humid.

He lets out a laugh, light and surprised. “You're ticklish!”

She rolls her eyes. His laughter surrounds her, like the night sky hugging the moon. She feels cradled by the sound.

He doesn’t move his hand away. “Now I know your secret,” he says, like he’s got a prize in his hand. He says it in a way a young boy would taunt a girl, telling her he _knows_ things, when he doesn’t know anything at all.

For a moment, Maia thinks about breaking it for him, whatever he thinks he has in his hands. To him, it’s probably a prized rune design, knowing in the sleek curve of it that her secret sits there, like one would expect a werewolf to perch on the base of the crescent moon. 

“Yeah,” she says, smiling. She’s supposed to look serious, stern, like a wolf with sharp teeth, but he looks like a boy, young and unburdened, and so she only nips instead. “You do. What are you going to do with such knowledge, Jace Wayland?”

It’s Herondale now, but Maia thinks he wears Wayland better. His shoulders are freer, back straighter. The way he walks is with his hands empty of a chip gun.

He leans back in his chair, hand withdrawn from her neck. While he taps his chin, looking like a _kid_ more than an intimidating Shadowhunter, the slope of her neck feels cold. “I think that’s for me to know,” he says, voice deep, “and for you to find out.”

“I’m shaking in my boots.”

“I can see that.”

She licks her lips, he watches. Then, he shifts. It’s loud enough to make the stool groan against the floor.

“I think your scar is cool,” he says. She looks at him, feeling out of sorts. He looks it, too. “I know … what it stands for,” he says, tentatively. He knows some of it. It’s hard not to tell him, especially when he wakes her up from that night. She screams, howls, and he wakes her, shaking, grip always warm, hard, _there_. His grip is unbreakable now, even though he’s not touching her. “But you don’t have to let it stand for that.”

“Is that why you’re Jace Wayland these days?” She doesn’t mean to ask it. It’s too personal of a question, even though what they’re talking about is also too personal. Despite him, what little he knows of her origin story, she knows the answer to her own question. He’s told her at night, against the curve of her neck, against those scars he’s never touched like that way before.

He cracks a smile. “Yeah,” he says, and it’s not a joke for once. “I like being Jace Herondale, but Jace Wayland rolls off the tongue better.”

“He’s also a decent guy,” she says. He looks up at her, smiling, also looking a bit surprised. 

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” 

The bar seems to quieten then, the humidity stretching, thinning. She should probably make a move to pack up, bark at him to finish his glass. She does neither of those things.

“I think you and your scar look good together,” he says. It’s an echo, a ghost of a sentiment said not too long ago. It was years before, when she thought he looked best with a redhead by his side, and he had thought a wolf with full cheeks and a bright smile suited standing beside a boy who had a pale appreciation for her. 

This time, though, she doesn’t think it’s wishful. It’s not tentatively stitched together, like some sort of blessing, some version of their own ‘thumbs up, congratulations on scoring the boy or girl you were pining after’. She doesn't pine for Simon Lewis, though she suspects he still yearns for Clary Fray.

“Thanks,” she says, standing taller. Prouder. She’s a wolf with a matted coat, feeling beautiful despite the knots and tangles. 

“I’ll help you clean up,” he says, stool scraping loudly against the wooden floor. He stands at full height and lifts his jacket from the stool beside him. She watches his broad shoulders beneath his shirt as he lets the jacket pile on the counter, like a reminder there’s a piece of him here. “Then we can get out of here?”

She nods. He smiles, and he makes a move to start walking. Her voice stops him.

“Make sure you wipe _everything_ up,” she barks. It’s her _yes_. Tilting her head back, standing taller, she picks up the rag and looks at him pointedly, “I want this place looking _spotless_.”

Throwing the rag at him, he clutches it to his chest, like she’d pelted it at his throat. With a wink, he curtsies, “Yes ma’am.” Then he gets to work.


End file.
